Studies show music can
influence which wines you buy and how they taste when you’re drinking
them. Lettie Teague conducts a few nonscientific experiments of her own.

I WENT WINE SHOPPING
recently in New Jersey. Bruce Springsteen was playing on the store’s
sound system—naturally. The Boss is an inescapable musical presence in
his home state. Why not in a wine shop? But maybe because “Glory Days”
isn’t one of my favorites (my tastes, Bruce-wise, tend toward “Thunder
Road”), I found the music distracting. Instead of focusing on the
Chablis selection, I was rifling through alternate Springsteen tunes in
my head. Was this really what the retailer wanted me to do?

Several studies produced over the past couple of decades demonstrate
how music can influence the wines people buy—and even how a wine’s
taste is perceived. A 1999 study by members of the psychology department
at the University of Leicester, published in the Journal of Applied
Psychology, analyzed 82 wine buyers in a suburban English supermarket.
The team found that when shoppers heard French music in the store,
French wine outsold German wine by a ratio of five to one. Likewise,
when German music was playing, German wines sold well. (No mention was
made of California wines, but maybe Beach Boys music was hard for an
English supermarket to track down.)
Adrian North, now head of
psychology at Curtin University in Perth, Australia, coauthored this
study. In 2010, he conducted another while he was a professor at the
Heriot-Watt University, in Edinburgh, that combined drinking wine and
listening to various types of music. Professor North recruited 125 men
and 125 women, all under age 25, to drink Chilean Cabernet and Chilean
Chardonnay while listening to four types of music.
The music ranged from powerful and heavy to mellow and soft, played
briefly while participants tasted the wines. For readers who might want
to try this experiment at home, the powerful and heavy music was Carl
Orff’s cantata “Carmina Burana”; the subtle and refined piece was Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers”; a Nouvelle Vague cover of Depeche Mode’s “Just Can’t Get Enough” fit the “zingy and refreshing” category; and “Slow Breakdown,” by Michael Brook, was the mellow and soft selection.
It
turned out the music did have a measurable impact on the impression of
the wine: When lively music was playing, the group overwhelmingly found
the wine to be lively, and when powerful music was playing, the wine
seemed powerful as well. When the music was mellow and soft, the
participants found the same qualities in their glasses.
These
studies certainly seemed to demonstrate that music could influence how
people perceived or purchased a particular wine or type of wine. But did
the findings hold true in everyday life? Does music influence the way
wine tastes and smells for most wine drinkers? Does playing certain
music really put people in the mood to buy certain types of wine, or is
it really just a background soundtrack that you either like or dislike?
I decided to ask some wine professionals I know who are equally passionate about music and wine. My first call was to David Stevens,
a wine merchant by day and rock musician by night. Mr. Stevens and his
wife, Monica, own 750 Wines in St. Helena, Calif., and Mr. Stevens plays
in a band with several Napa winemakers. The Stevenses consider music so
important, it’s one of nine topics on a questionnaire they send private
clients when scheduling a tasting. (Other questions poll standard
predilections such as favorite wines and price range.) What is the most
common musical preference? “Classic rock,” said Mr. Stevens. And the
least? “I think we’ve had one group ask for opera.”
Mr. Stevens
said if clients like the music playing, they might be inclined to like
the wine they’re tasting, too, and he thinks people respond to music
they are comfortable with, or “what they were brought up on.” Music also
helps bring their guard down, noted Mr. Stevens, and that probably
makes them more receptive to buying. Was there any music that didn’t
have that effect? “Hip-hop would be totally distracting,” he said.
And
yet at Charlie Bird in New York, which has one of the city’s best wine
lists, partner Robert Bohr plays hip-hop almost exclusively. As far as
he’s concerned, hip-hop can only improve the taste of a wine. “Hip-hop
makes me happy so I’m probably liking the wine more when I’m listening
to it,” said Mr. Bohr, who also manages private wine collections. At
least at Charlie Bird, hip-hop doesn’t have the effect Mr. Stevens
predicted. Last time I dined there, a room full of talkative,
wine-drinking diners effectively drowned out the music.
And then
there is City Winery, where wine and music are on equal footing. A
restaurant, winery and music space, City Winery was founded in 2008 in
Manhattan by owner Michael Dorf, who went on to open three more locations in Chicago, Napa and Nashville.
“I believe there is a direct correlation between the music in your
ears and the wine in your glass,” Mr. Dorf said. He’s even editing a
book on pairing wine and music that will be published later this summer.
A sample entry from the book pairs Al Green with Amarone della
Valpolicella, the big, rich red from Veneto, Italy. “If Al Green were to
sing a wine into existence, you’d better believe it would be this
deliciously smooth Amarone,” reads the text.
Mr. Dorf cited some
real ways he’s seen music influence customers’ choices of wine. “With
bands with a heavy bass line, we’ll sell more Syrah and more California
Cabernets,” he said. When bands with a “higher tone” play, sales of
white wine go up.
Mr. Dorf has noticed other correlations. For example, when
singer-songwriters such as Steve Earle or Suzanne Vega play, New World
wines—from places like California and Oregon—sell very well. Older
bluegrass musicians tend to move Old World wines, from Italy and France.
There was one exception to these rules: “In Chicago, they drink
everything,” said Mr. Dorf. “They skew the results.”
Mark Snyder
owns Angels’ Share, a New York-based wine distributor, and is the
founder of Brooklyn’s Red Hook Winery. He’s also a classically trained
guitarist who once toured with Peter Frampton and Ringo Starr and still
works with Billy Joel.
Did Mr. Snyder think music influenced a taster’s perception of wine? He
said he could draw associations and justifications for why a piece of
music might fit a wine. (“It’s light on its feet, it’s bright,” he
offered, as if making a note of a wine or a piece of music.) But he
eschewed directives such as “Drink Chianti with Billy Joel” or “Bordeaux
is good with Chopin,” saying it would be like “telling someone what to
feel when they looked at a painting.”
I sought the opinion of one more person: musician and vintner Boz Scaggs. I figured a man who had both a vineyard in Napa and multiplatinum albums might have some valuable insight.
I
caught up with Mr. Scaggs just before his new album, “A Fool to Care,”
made its debut earlier this week. Did he think music could influence how
someone perceived a wine? “I don’t see why not,” replied Mr. Scaggs.
Could he be more definitive? “There might be a bottle of
Châteauneuf-du-Pape that goes well with my outlook on life,” he offered,
which didn’t exactly answer my question. Had Mr. Scaggs ever tasted his
own wine listening to his own music and found one tune made it taste
one way and one song another way? He had not.
I decided to try
it myself. I bought a bottle of the 2009 Scaggs Vineyard Mt. Veeder
Montage ($45), a red Rhône-style blend of Mourvèdre, Grenache and Syrah.
Then I downloaded a couple of songs from his 1976 album, “Silk
Degrees,” and served the wine (label concealed) to three friends.
We tasted it with the first and second songs. Everyone agreed the
character of the wine was soft and approachable but possessed a
some-what short finish, although my friend Richard said the first song
(the famous and funky but relatively slow “Lowdown”)
made the wine seem a bit simple. My friend Marilyn agreed, while the
last taster, Robin, found the opposite to be true. Richard further
opined that the second Boz Scaggs tune (“It’s Over,”
an up-tempo heartbreak song) made the wine “more complete” and made the
finish seem less abrupt. We re-tasted the wine. I thought Richard was
right—the emotion of the song seemed to fill the wine out.
Perhaps
our little exercise didn’t prove much beyond a certain subjective
truth: When wine and music are combined, the reaction is an entirely
personal one. For example, according to Gary Fisch, owner of Gary’s
Wines & Marketplace in Wayne, N.J., where I heard that Bruce tune,
Springsteen is the music his customers prefer. “That’s the generation of
the customers,” he said. Mr. Fisch agreed that music definitely
influenced shopping behavior, or in his case, shopping avoidance. “There
are some stores I won’t shop in because I hate the music,” he said.